Under the Bridge Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2012 by Michael Harmon

  Jacket art copyright © 2012 by Shutterstock

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc.,

  New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! randomhouse.com/teens

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Harmon, Michael B.

  Under the bridge / by Michael Harmon. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Wearing a police wire, a skateboarding street boy from Spokane confronts the drug dealer who threatens to kill his brother.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89642-2

  [1. Skateboarding—Fiction. 2. Brothers—Fiction. 3. Drug dealers—Fiction.

  4. Spokane (Wash.)—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.H22723Und 2012

  [Fic]—dc23

  2011036368

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  For Syd and Dylan

  Special thanks to the crew: my son, Dylan, Andrew, Keylen, Aaron, Morgan, Hoover, Litz, and all the other skaters and friends who have filled our home with laughter, love, half-pipes, band practice, great times, awesome stories, and craziness. Your duty, respect, trust, and friendship toward each other inspire me and helped me write this story.

  This one’s for you, guys. And for Snakebite!

  With love and respect, Mike

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Note from the Author

  CHAPTER ONE

  “This is not a drill. Please exit the school to your designated target areas immediately.”

  I looked up at the intercom as the tired voice of Vice Principal Lackard echoed through the halls. If there was concern in that tinny voice, it was masked by complete indifference. Maybe a hidden wish that one of these times it would turn out to be real and that this school would end up being a shrapneled example of what went wrong with our youth. Of what went wrong with this world. “Such a terrible loss,” he’d say, splaying his hands and shaking his head to the news cameras while behind him the smoking ruins of our fine institution collapsed upon themselves.

  Then he’d go home, sit on his back porch, his wife would hand him a gin and tonic, and he’d tell her we deserved every last piece of rubble. You could see it in his eyes when he walked down the hall. Guys today don’t shoot spitballs and gather after school for the occasional fistfight. They punch teachers, stomp heads, sell dope, pack heat, and make pipe bombs. I didn’t blame the guy. We’re pretty fucked up as generations go.

  I walked from my locker, my pack over my shoulder and my board in my hands. No English today. I glanced at the clock above the exit as I shouldered my way through masses of students pressing for the doors; half of them bug-eyed, the other half accustomed to evacuations and looking forward to sixth period being cut from the schedule. I could hear the sirens already. This was becoming routine.

  “Lemmings on the march.”

  I turned, and Sid, long black hair in his eyes, deck slung through his pack, skintight straight-leg jeans outlining his bony knees, sauntered toward me. We walked closer to our designated herding area. “Bomb threat, right?” I said, wondering if this one might be different. Alien invasion. The president visiting. Something to look at besides three thousand students streaming from the campus like water from a shot-gunned and rusted barrel.

  He grinned, looking back at the red-and-gray brick Goliath called our school. “Yep.” Either Sid Valentino could hear the whispering voices through the walls or he was psychic, but he always knew what was going on in this place. And everywhere else.

  “False alarm?”

  His Adam’s apple bobbed as he chuckled. “If we gotta dodge flying bodies in the next few minutes, I’d say real.”

  Sirens screeched closer from the downtown core of the city, racing toward the school. In the next moment, the Spokane City Bomb Squad rolled by in some kind of Star Wars armored vehicle, black-uniformed guys hanging from the sides, studying us like we might be the next Bin Laden. “This is lame,” I said.

  “Wanna hit the Monster? Piper and your bro should be there on this occasion of terrorist-inspired freedom.”

  Standard evacuation procedure said that once each group of the student body reached their “target” points, buses would transport three thousand students to the Veterans Arena, five miles away, for our parents to pick us up. Disciplinary procedures would be applied to any student leaving without a parental signature. Dad would be more pissed about having to leave work than about me getting busted for what he called idiocy. We could take care of ourselves, and Dad quit being our babysitter a long time ago. “Sure. I’m not wasting the next four hours sitting in a parking lot.”

  Sid smiled. “They’re just grooming us to be good refugees. It doesn’t work if nobody knows how to be refugee-ish.”

  I adjusted my pack higher on my shoulder. Sid wasn’t exactly the most optimistic of people. “I can think for myself, thanks.”

  He loped along next to me. “Thinking is dangerous, dude. Just blindly follow. It goes along with the grand plan of devolution.”

  I laughed. “Whatever, Sid.”

  A good six hundred students milled around our staging-and-transportation area as we arrived. Sid gazed at the crowd. “See, I’m right. Evolution in reverse.”

  I smirked. “How?”

  He laughed. “When some dumb-ass calls in a bomb threat, our incredibly brilliant leaders evacuate a fifteen-acre school to avoid a large body count, pack us all into two areas that are a quarter the size, and call it a ‘safe’ zone.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  He looked around. “I don’t know about you,
but I don’t see much that makes this place safe, and I do know that any wacko with half a damn brain would call the threat in, wait till we’re all packed together here, then blow us up. He’d need half the explosives to kill twice the people.” He paused. “Devolution, man. And I don’t know who’s worse—the jackhole that came up with this plan or the idiots who follow it.”

  I chuckled. Sid might have been the most dark, depressing, moody person I knew, but his logic made sense. “I suppose so.”

  “I know so. Look. They think they’re safe because some tardo told them they’re safe.”

  “Well, I’m glad you’re not a bomber.”

  He shrugged. “People are so good at killing themselves they don’t need my help.”

  “True.”

  Sid nodded, looking around again. “I don’t feel like being stupidized any more. Let’s split.”

  I nodded. “Under the Bridge?”

  He unstrapped his board. “Under the Bridge it is.”

  Under the Bridge is the one thing that makes Spokane even close to cool for teenagers, and when the city built it, we thought it would be the lame of the lame when it came to skate parks. A bunch of square-headed politicians sitting around figuring out how to get votes. They’d build a park, all right, but it would suck in the best politically correct way. Helmet and pads required. Rules. Regulations. Security guards. Shallow bowls and short rails. A homogenized version of what could be cool.

  Wrong. Before breaking ground, the developers actually brought in a dozen boarders and talked with them about what makes a park a good park, and they did a hell of a job on it. They also built the Monster, and my brother, Indy, owns it.

  The Monster is the biggest, deepest, craziest skate bowl in Spokane, and the state of Washington for that matter, and Indy skates it like he was born on the flip side of a deck. Sixteen feet of vertical concrete keeps the kiddies on the other side of the park, and we like it that way.

  Indy’s a year younger than me, and probably the best skater, sponsored or not, in the city. He’s also the worst high school student in the universe, too, which pisses me off because he could ace every class if he wanted to. I, on the other hand, suck at school because it’s hard.

  He laughs when I tell him he could do better. Life is like balancing on a teeter-totter, he says, and the trick is to get some big-ass air before the world jumps off the other end and smacks you down. That’s the difference between us. I don’t like teeter-totters; he jumps on them every chance he gets.

  As brothers, he and I share a mother. And a father. A hugely muscled metalworker of a father who has a hard time knowing who he’s yelling at after the school calls about Indy skipping class. I should get I’M JUST HIS BROTHER tattooed on my forehead. Dad’s anger is like a bomb going off, and anybody caught in the damage zone is toast.

  The Monster sits on the far edge of the concrete skate park, stuck between two of the dozen huge concrete pillars that hold the freeway up above our heads. Under the Bridge. Located just on the edge of downtown, it was almost like home to Indy, Piper, Sid, and me.

  There’s a three-foot-high concrete wall dividing the park from the street, and we meet there every day after school. As Sid and I reached it, Piper, kicking his heels against the wall as he sat, nodded to us. I unslung my pack, dropped it next to my board, and hopped up on the wall next to him, waving to Stumper the Bum, who half dozed in a drunken stupor next to his shopping cart across the street. Bums on this end of the park, drug dealers on the other. I wondered where Stumper would be when the end of the world really came, realizing that Sid had nothing on being a refugee. Stumper had been one for years. I slapped Piper five. “Seen Indy?”

  “Nope. Not in class this morning, either,” Piper said. Piper and Indy had second period together. He hitched a thumb toward the school, where we could still hear the sirens. “They should just plan these things. Make it easier on my schedule.”

  Sid hopped up to the ledge and shook a smoke from a crumpled pack of cigarettes, lighting up. “Only real people have schedules.”

  “And you’re a real people?”

  Sid hot-boxed the cigarette, his already hollow cheeks sucking in further. The bonus about thinking you’d die at any given moment was that lung cancer in fifty years didn’t enter the equation. “Sure not. Wouldn’t want to be.”

  I took a piece of gum from my pocket and stuck it in my mouth. “Not in class, huh?” I unzipped my pack and unfolded my report card, a reminder that another kind of apocalypse would be waged at our house tonight. I stared at the grades. Four B’s, a C in math, and an A in fitness. I knew mine were better than Indy’s, and I sighed.

  Piper spit. “Saw him this morning in the parking lot. Figured he’d be here.”

  Sid glanced at my grades. “Can I have tickets?”

  “To what?”

  “To your dad ripping your head off and crapping down your neck.”

  I tucked the paper in my pocket. “Yours are better?”

  He laughed. “My dad’s passed out by the time I get home, Tate. I got no worries.”

  “What about you, Pipe?”

  “Two B’s, two A’s, and two C’s.”

  “Wow.”

  He nodded. “My mom owes me five bucks per A. We made a deal.”

  Sid rolled his eyes. “Sellout.”

  Piper shrugged, holding up his middle finger to Sid. “Know what this is?”

  “An offensive gesture in fifty-three countries?”

  Pipe shook his head, smiling. “Nope. Me not giving a shit what you think.”

  Sid clutched his heart. “Mortal wound.”

  I gazed around the park. “Indy didn’t say anything to you, Piper?”

  “No, but he’s been hanging with Angie. And that new guy, Will. I saw them at lunch yesterday.”

  I watched as a few private-school kidlets, out early for some private-school reason, piled out of a minivan with their moms, apparently unaware that Lewis and Clark had been evacuated due to a bomb threat. My thoughts went back to Indy. He’d never been voted attendance king, but lately he’d been skipping more often. “Will? Tall guy? Shaved head with a tat on his neck?”

  Sid nodded. “From Texas. And that tat is killer.”

  “He skates?”

  Sid shook his head. “Naw. I heard he packs, though.”

  I grunted. “A pistol?”

  “No, a pickle.”

  “Is he a gangbanger?”

  “No.”

  “Then what?”

  He shrugged. “Just hard-core. Nobody really knows.”

  Piper spoke up, his sandy voice droll. “Like thirty percent of all Texans carry guns. I read it in Playboy. It’s on account of the beaners. The beaners and gringos don’t like each other because of the Alamo.”

  I smiled. “Read that in Playboy, too?”

  “No, but the Mexicans pee on our lettuce to get back at us,” Piper shot back.

  Sid shrugged again. “Ozzy Osbourne pissed on the Alamo. Got arrested.”

  Piper shook his head. “I’m serious. Ever seen a porta-potty in all those fields down south? Just a bunch of Mexican dudes peeing on our food because we put the x in Texas.”

  Sid took a drag of his smoke. “Cool.”

  Piper looked toward the row of buildings lining Third Avenue. “Only you would think so, Sid.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t eat vegetables, and besides, I’d do it myself.”

  I smiled. If Sid ever got a job, and that job had to do with a restaurant, I wouldn’t even eat the crackers.

  Sid hopped from the wall, digging in his bag and bringing out some beef jerky. As he did, Michael Thorburne walked over to us. Sid nodded to him. “ ’Sup.”

  Michael looked around. “You guys hitting on anything?”

  Piper pointed to the other side of the park, a block away. “That side of the park, Mike.”

  Michael went on. “Got some good stuff if you want. From up north. Strong.”

  Sid smiled. “We quit. You know that. Everybo
dy does.”

  He furrowed his brow. “Yeah, sure. Cutter. I didn’t know if …”

  I stood, staring. “Yeah. Cutter.”

  Michael backed away a step. “Cutter was cool. I’m sorry.”

  Piper hopped from the ledge, grabbing his board. “I’m clean. Over a year.”

  Michael nodded. “Didn’t mean to mess with you.”

  “No problem. Just don’t ask again,” Piper said, uncharacteristically pissed off. He looked at me. “I’m skating the bowl.” Then he walked behind the ledge and over to the Monster.

  Michael watched Piper leave, then looked at me again. “I didn’t mean …”

  I studied him, wondering why he’d even bring it up. “He’s still messed up about it. We all are.”

  “It was a raw deal.”

  I shook my head. “Doesn’t matter. He’s dead. And he’s dead because of the shit you sell.”

  “You know I don’t deal the hard stuff, Tate. Just 420. And you know I wasn’t involved in the stuff he got ahold of. That was all Lucius and his boys.”

  Lucius ran all the hard stuff surrounding the school. Meth, crack, scripts, heroin, he did it all, but he was small-time. Two or three guys dealt for him, but he had a monopoly Under the Bridge. I’d seen him several times when he’d come by to check things out. He pretty much kept to himself, didn’t talk much, and I liked it that way.

  “I know. But don’t be stupid, Mike. Stay away from the crew.” Just then, I spotted Indy getting out of an old beater station wagon down the street. “Be back in a minute.”

  Sid flipped his chin toward the vert, his mouth full of jerky. “At the Monster with Pipe. Catch us.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  I dropped my board and skated along the sidewalk, watching as Will opened the driver’s door and talked with a guy at the entrance of an old apartment building.

  Indy saw me, smiled, and flashed me the peace sign. Angie Simmons, a cross between a Goth chick, white-trash girl, and storage container for STD’s, grimaced from the backseat as I came up to them. She defined irritating, and was just barely smart enough to know she was.

  Will wore a white wife-beater tank top and faded jeans, with a gold necklace around his neck and several tats running down his shoulders and forearms, including the snake on his neck that slithered down his chest. He was built like an ultimate fighter, and I had to admit the guy was imposing. He studied me, his face a rock, his eyes intense as he hooked his thumbs into his belt loops and leaned against the car.